In today's world of technology and digital information handling, individuals may store information or data in a variety of different devices and locations. Often the user stores the same information in more than one device and/or location. The user would like all of the various data stores to have the same information without having to manually input the same changes to each data store. Replication is one process used to ensure that each data store has the same information.
For example, a user may maintain an electronic address book in a variety of different devices or locations. The user may maintain the address book, for example, on a personal information manager stored on their desktop computer, on their laptop computer, in a personal digital assistant (PDA), in an on-line contacts manager, and the like. The user can modify the electronic address books in each location by, for example, adding a contact, deleting a contact, or changing contact information. Replication is used to ensure that the change made on a particular device is ultimately reflected in the data stores of the user's other devices.
Replication becomes increasingly more complicated as the number of devices and/or services a particular user uses increases and/or the size or processing capabilities of those devices decreases. For example, many users have thumb drives, removable memory, PDA's, phones, portable music devices, and so on. Information such as contacts records would be useful to have on many of those devices and/or synchronized among those devices, yet many of those types of devices do not even have a computer processor that is often required to participate in a typical synchronization process. These synchronization problems can be further compounded when group sharing of data is involved, such as multiple users sharing a group calendar.